I was born in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, on Sunday, November 15, 1964, which means I’m getting older every day, every day. I grew up on a farm and wished I lived in a subdivision where I would surely have had many friends to play with. I climbed trees and waded in the wash and fed white loaf bread to the cows through the page wire fence. I grew and grew and went to school and learned many things. My school was in Ringgold, ten miles away, a straight shot up Alabama Highway.
I read books and read books and chased after the other kids in tag, never quite able to get them, running circles around me, those mean boys, after church, the meanest kids in my life the kids at church. I went to church on Sunday mornings and Sunday nights and Wednesday nights. I went to church camp and accepted Jesus as my personal savior on a Thursday night in my bedroom. I thought this would change me, but it didn’t. I was still me, still raging with thoughts of sex and badness and inside I was surely a din of iniquity, full of sin and anguish. But that’s a whole other story, me and God, the making and the undoing.
In my first semester of college I got knocked up, dropped out, got married(and shortly divorced),and had the baby. He’s twenty-eight now. I got married a second time and it stuck, has been sticking for over twenty-three years. I have another son who is twenty-two and someone please tell me how this is possible, me with these grown-up sons. I still can’t believe it.
But I did go back to college and got my degree in English Literature from the University of Tennessee Chattanooga in 1998. Then I got a Master’s degree in Rhetoric and Composition from the same school in 2001. Then I got an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2009. I am very educated but often still dumb as a post.
I live in Chattanooga now with Dale and Alex and James and Lulu and Strider and Lestat. I write prose and poetry and publish in lots of literary magazines like New England Review, New Orleans Review, Wicked Alice, The Adirondack Review, Orchid, Carve, and Diode. I was a Bread Loaf Scholar in Fiction in 2009. I teach creative writing and literature at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, my alma mater. I have lived in this same area my whole life.
The good news is that I have a book coming out, finally, finally, finally. It’s called CLICK and it’s beautiful and dark, a beautiful, dark dream. It’s going to be published by Kitsune Books in 2013. I have to wait all that time for it to finally arrive. Today it’s December 28, 2011. The world could end before I ever get to hold it in my hands. But I hope, I hope, I hope the world doesn’t end.
